AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Abstract View
Chemical Composition of Particle Emissions from Clean Cookstoves
Clarissa Smith, Tsegaye Nega, DEBORAH GROSS, Carleton College
Abstract Number: 274 Working Group: Indoor Aerosols
Abstract Clean cookstoves show tremendous promise for alleviating health and climate effects around the globe. In many areas in the developing world, people cook over open fires fueled by wood, charcoal, or animal waste. The emissions from these fires significantly impact the health of the cooks, leading to ~4 million deaths per year, globally, according to the World Health Organization. In addition, the demand for fuel is high and gathering fuel contributes to deforestation as well as having social costs, as it requires timely labor to gather the fuel. We have been developing a cookstove for use in Ethiopia, with the goal of developing a low-emission, high efficiency stove that meets the needs of Ethiopian cooks while being affordable. We have characterized the particulate emissions from a series of prototype Top-Lit Updraft (TLUD) stoves as well as one commercially available exemplar stove using single-particle mass spectrometry, and have found that the design has a significant impact on the PM2.5 emission rate as well as the EC/OC ratio and the specific composition of the emitted particles. We will present the impact of stove design on particle emissions and composition, based on adjustment of the distance between the secondary air intake and the pot on the best-performing stove. The cleanest prototype stove performed nearly as well as the commercially available stove and costs less to produce.